


A Letter To The Editor

by holographiccatpun



Series: shcool [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Other, child labor laws, miners, mining, minor miners, written for my mythology class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:01:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25567129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holographiccatpun/pseuds/holographiccatpun
Series: shcool [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852840





	A Letter To The Editor

My name is unimportant. My world does not place any value on the name of a man like me. I stand alongside my brothers in arms and stare into a void as deep and dark as the endless, black void of space. The eye may adjust, but the mind will not.

I work in the mines. Like the men with me, I have seen the things within their twisting caverns that no known language can truly capture. There are seven men in each company, I am the leader of mine. The men I work with show the near full range of minework’s effects, save the most severe. Sadly, no matter how much we long for the release of our immortal bonds, no gods have seen it fit to grant us our final peace. Some may think that lucky, but our suffering has merely been continued. There is no end in sight except for one of our own creation.

The hollow of the mine creates a similar hollow within one’s mind. It makes men not themselves. They are not who they are. Some bottle the horror, forcing emotion deep into the bottom-most depths of their consciousness. They allow themselves only rage, stoking that ire and numbing all other aches with bottles of the drink. These fellows seem well enough off in the pit, but one can hardly fathom what may happen in their homes. 

The men who don’t, though, their personalities warp, twisting into cruel and inhuman caricatures of the human beings they once were. These boys, most not quite men yet, are broken by the torment. Their fragile young hearts cannot handle the things they see. The only men who walk into the mines with smiles on their faces are the ones whose fear of death has been washed away. They can no longer feel the innate dread that right-minded men would at their plight. They smile because they can’t understand why not to, either that, or they cling, desperate and terrified, to the single controllable fragment left of their normal human lives. If their whole world is controlled by the Corporation, at least they get to choose what they do in facing it. In that right, I respect them. I wish I could force that bravado, but the fire within me is turning to embers and the inferno around me will soon consume the things that remain. This is the reason I write. I am not long, soon I will make my final trip to the mines, and Stockman cannot come for me once I am departed. 

My best worker has fallen out of sorts in a manner somehow even worse. After an incident involving another company’s pickman swinging his axe too hard, his cognizance has seemingly gone to the wayside. This boy was barely old enough to work in these mines and yet now his is yet another soul swallowed up by the ravenous maw of the diamond caves. 

He isn’t the only one injured. Even now, I cannot lift a pen to write this, hands too gnarled to cradle the delicate quill steady enough to make any sort of legible words. I am dictating to a girl, her age too fair to know the horror of which I fear too much to speak in her presence. Even the things said thus far are bringing guilt into my very heart. I am burdening this child with knowledge no person should ever possess. The gentle innocence of her countenance is warping with every syllable, the joy of living is being sapped from her eyes by my mere voice alone. I am responsible for her loss, I may concede, but the injuries of the rest, of the people other than this snow-fair lily, those are on the shoulders of the Stockwell Corporation. 

  
  
  
  


The actions of Stockwell have gone unchecked for far too long. If the paper can not do something, the workers soon will.

  
  



End file.
